


Traggob

by Anonymous



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Magical Artifacts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-19 00:35:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29991216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Trying to avoid his father and the storm raging outside, Theo and Draco discover the secrets of the Nott Manor attic.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy & Theodore Nott
Kudos: 6
Collections: 2021 DBQ Round One: Boggart





	Traggob

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [TheSlytherinCabal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSlytherinCabal/pseuds/TheSlytherinCabal) in the [DBQ2021Round1](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/DBQ2021Round1) collection. 



> Disclaimer: The characters do not belong to me but are the property of J.K.R. and Warner Bros. No copyright infringement is intended. The theme for this round of the competition was Boggart and my chosen pairing was Draco Malfoy/Theodore Nott. Comments/Reviews are encouraged by The Slytherin Cabal's Admin Team on all stories in Death By Quill, but comments left by readers are set to be moderated by story authors until the end of the competition in order to protect participants' anonymity. Thank you to my beta for their time and help.

Theo quietly opened the door to the attic on the far side of Nott Manor and snuck inside, pulling Draco with him. His father rarely came to this wing but he wanted the extra door between him and his patriarch.

It wasn't that he wasn't allowed in the attic—he had free range of the entire house except for the master bedroom—but he never knew what kind of mood his father would be in. Most days, Theo was ignored in favour of books or drinks with old friends. But Cantankerous Nott was about as friendly as his name suggested.

And today was a bad day.

Draco was staying with him for a few days whilst Lucius and Narcissa were out of town. Originally, they had planned to fly or play Quidditch, but there was a nasty storm raging outside. Instead of staying in and trying to avoid his father, they had made their way upstairs, hoping they might find something in the attic that they could prank the other Slytherin boys with when they returned to school.

Theo looked around the room as Draco went to investigate a shelf full of potions. The cavernous space was filled with old furniture and more than one dark artefact. After the Dark Lord's return, his father had moved the worst of their things to the attics and placed blood wards over the doors to keep the Ministry out, just in case.

The Dark Lord.

How anyone was fool enough to follow that man was beyond Theo's comprehension. He may have been raised to believe that being a member of the Sacred Twenty-Eight meant he was better than anyone of lesser blood, but he couldn't wrap his head around why Muggleborns had to die. What was the point?

Now that he had been to school and met people outside of his father's circle of friends, he couldn't understand that way of thinking at all. Sure, he thought wizards and witches were better than Muggles; anyone with magic would be better than someone without it. But he didn't see the harm in Muggleborns. Justin Finch-Fletchley wasn't a threat to anyone. Or Hermione Granger. She was the most magically powerful person in their year and she was Muggle-born.

Yet he could clearly remember playing games like 'Capture the Mudblood', where his father would transfigure a rock into an evil-looking creature and he and Draco would have to beat it with sticks until it surrendered. Or how they used to take their quills and draw Dark Marks on their forearms to be like their fathers. They had been so proud of the art and had been praised for being good Pureblood heirs.

That was not the life Theo wanted for himself now. When he finished his schooling, he wanted to leave the toxic house he lived in and become a healer. He wanted to save lives, regardless of how pure their lineage was.

A mirror he'd never seen before caught his eye and he walked towards it, perplexed. He thought he'd mentally catalogued everything in his home. It was almost as tall as the vaulted ceiling and framed in dark wood with words carved around the edge. Warily, he moved closer to read them.

"Sra ef tsep ee druoy yl no woh si, trag go blan rete."

Theo racked his brain trying to figure out what language it was in. He was fluent in English, all the major Romance languages, and Latin, and passable in Germanic and Slavic dialects, yet none of them helped him figure out what it said.

He was still repeating the words in his head when he stepped fully in front of the mirror. A flash of movement made him look into the glass and he jumped back; he hadn't even noticed Draco following him to the mirror.

They were standing side-by-side in heavy black robes, silver masks dangling from their fingers. As if they had practised it, they each pulled up their left sleeve and exposed the Dark Mark tattooed on their forearms. When Theo looked up at their faces, they were wearing matching expressions of pride.

The scene seemed to be glowing green and when he looked up to find the source of the light in the mirror, he could just catch the green stars that made up the Morsmordre in the sky.

Did this mirror show the future?

He stepped back a few feet to take in the whole scene and his stomach dropped, bile filling his throat.

He and Draco were standing behind a pile of dead bodies on the ground. And they weren't faceless people; they were people they knew, people they went to school with. The broken bodies of Hermione Granger, Justin Finch-Flechley, that obnoxious kid with the camera and his brother, and every other Muggleborn person they went to Hogwarts with. His eyes scanned other faces and he saw Tracey Davis and Blaise Zabini, both half-bloods, in the pile.

As Theo gaped in horror, his father and Lucius walked into the mirror, their faces proud as they clapped him and Draco on the back. There was no noise but he could hear his father telling him that he was proud of his actions, whispering in his ear that he had done well.

The bile in his throat rose higher and he couldn't keep it in. Forcing his eyes closed, he turned to the side and emptied the contents of his stomach onto the worn wooden floor.

"What the fuck?" Draco cried, and he heard his friend's footsteps rushing towards him. "Mate, you okay?"

Theo couldn't answer and only shook his head as he retched again. Draco was quiet for a long time and when Theo composed himself as best he could, he looked up. He saw his friend looking into the mirror and taking deep, gasping breaths.

"What is this?" Draco choked out, raising his finger as if to touch the surface.

He had tears running down his face and before Theo could ask him what he saw, Draco dropped to his knees and began to sob. Forcing himself to move and not look in the mirror, he crawled to his best friend and wrapped his arms around him.

"I don't know," Theo admitted. "What did you see?"

"My… my mum. Dead. I… I was standing over her. I… Oh gods, Theo. I was torturing her. The Dark Lord was making me use the Cruciatus Curse on her. And… and then I… I killed her. I killed my mum."

Theo's mind was racing. He couldn't imagine a future where Draco would ever kill Narcissa. He was a mummy's boy through and through. There was nothing he wouldn't do for his mother.

Was that really his best friend's future? To kill the one person he loved more than anything?

No. It couldn't be.

And yet Draco had seen it. Just as clearly as Theo had seen them standing over the broken bodies of the people they knew.

There had to be a way to change the future.

A choking sound from Draco pulled Theo from his thoughts and he tried to hold on to his friend as he gasped for breath and gagged. He needed to calm Draco down so they could figure out what to do.

"Loony," he called and his house-elf popped into the attic with a crack.

Her eyes went wide as she looked from the boys on the floor to the mirror and back. Before she could speak, he barked a command at her.

"Bring two Calming Draughts, please."

Loony hesitated for a fraction of a second before disappearing. Theo didn't have time to think about her behaviour as he pulled Draco tighter to his side and made the same soothing noises that he had heard Narcissa use over the years. He wished he could offer words of comfort, could tell his best friend that he would never let that happen, but he couldn't. He'd seen his own future.

They would be Marked as Death Eaters and would have to obey the Dark Lord, whether they wanted to or not. He'd heard the stories from his father. Once you had the Mark, you followed through with what the Dark Lord wanted or you were handed to other Death Eaters to be dealt with. And no one wanted that.

A crack sounded and he reached out to take the potions from Loony, making sure Draco drank his before swallowing his own. The elf snapped her fingers, cleaning the sick from the floor and then conjuring glasses of water for them.

"Young master should not be looking in the evil mirror," Loony insisted. "It be showing evil things and driving people mad."

"Do you know what this mirror is?" Draco asked forcefully. "What can we do to change the future? Tell me!"

Theo held him back when he lunged for the elf.

"It not be showing the future."

Theo furrowed his brow in confusion. "But I saw… Loony, I saw things that haven't happened yet."

"The mirror being evil. It being made by dark wizards and trapping the boogeymen insides."

"Are you telling us that they trapped Boggarts in the mirror?" Draco asked.

"The glass is being made out of them. It be showing you the bad things you being scared of."

"It's… made out of Boggarts? So then I'm not going to kill…"

Draco trailed off and sighed in relief. Theo looked at the mirror again and the letters on the top seemed to flip around for him and he saw that it wasn't a foreign language. The letters were reversed; you would need a mirror to read them properly.

"Eternal Boggart, I show only your deepest fears," he read. "How do we destroy it?"

"You can't be smashing it. It be repairing itself if you does."

"Thank you, Loony. You may go."

As soon as the elf was gone, Theo turned to Draco. "What do you think?"

"It says eternal Boggart, right?" Draco said. "What if we conjured a mirror opposite it? Two mirrors facing each other create an eternal feedback. Then the Boggarts would see themselves and shift into what scares them the most, destroying themselves?"

Careful not to look into the glass, they conjured a second mirror, as large as the original, and placed it directly across from the eternal Boggart. They waited a few moments, but nothing happened. Clearly, it was a strong magical object and would need something more powerful.

"We need to hit it with Riddikulus." Theo looked between the mirrors quickly. "We'll each shoot it at a different one and the spells should bounce back and forth. But we'll need to laugh. What's a funny memory?"

"What about that time my mum caught you wanking?" Draco asked, smirking.

"Fuck off! That wasn't funny, it was embarrassing."

"I thought it was funny. Mother called you 'Tinky Winky' for the rest of the summer."

When Draco laughed, the mirror began to vibrate. Theo joined in, remembering the way Narcissa's face had turned crimson and the awkward talk Lucius had given him and Draco about making sure doors were locked before abusing themselves. He began to laugh harder and lifted his wand, pointing it at the Boggart mirror. Draco aimed at the other and they yelled the spell in unison.

The lights from their wands bounced back and forth between the two mirrors and Theo focused on laughing as hard as he could to power it. The Boggart mirror began to vibrate faster and faster until it suddenly exploded. Glass flew through the air, cutting their skin, but they didn't pay it any mind.

They watched as a few shapeless masses floated from the rubble and flew through the wall of the attic, presumably to haunt another part of the manor or another house altogether. Theo used his wand to heal the cuts on his own body before helping Draco.

As he healed him, Theo told Draco what he had seen in the mirror. Whilst he knew Boggarts showed their worst fears, he also knew that with who their fathers were, what they had seen could easily become their reality. Especially his. Lucius was favoured enough by the Dark Lord that Narcissa and Draco would be safe as long as the Malfoys behaved.

But Theo, Theo would be Marked as soon as he came of age. Even sooner if his father had his way.

"Draco, we need to make sure what we saw doesn't happen," he said firmly.

"I know," Draco agreed. "It's not as if I want to become a Death Eater, Theo. But I will do anything to keep my mother safe. There is no cost too high to make sure she isn't harmed. Including my own life."

He wasn't sure what to say to that, or if there was anything to say. Theo had lost his own mother when he was a year old and felt no love for his father. He had no idea what it was like to be willing to sacrifice everything for someone you loved. But he knew he would do whatever he could to make sure he and Draco stayed out of this war as long as possible.

Deciding to leave the attic, they vanished the mess and made their way down to Theo's personal sitting room. It may only be late morning, but they were in need of a stiff drink.


End file.
